Wide Awake Living Newsletter

Pangea Day

on May 10th

Dearest subscribers and friends;

It's a little early for my newsletter this month, but I didn't want to miss being able to tell you about Pangea Day on May 10th, in case you wanted to participate.

Now I didn't even know what Pangea was. Am I out of it? I had to look it up in the dictionary:

n. A hypothetical supercontinent that included all the landmasses of the earth before the Triassic Period. Pangaea broke apart during the Triassic and Jurassic Periods, separating into Laurasia and Gondwanaland.

It seems to being used kind of like Gaia is being used. Something to refer to increasingly evident thing about us all being in the same soup here. Anyway Pangea Day came from 2006, when filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference. She was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish.

So its a four hour event on May the 10th that will be a global event that is set up to help us see ourselves in all the diversity around the globe. Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. Interested? Check it out at www.pangeaday.org

If it looks good to you, like it did to me, you pass it on too.
New comings together are possible through the internet. Look at what has happened with Eckhart and Oprah.

By the way this Monday is the last week of Eckhart and Oprah's ten class series. You can go to either oprah.com or to itunes to download and are all of the lessons for free. If you go to itunes, click on podcasts and it will be evident because its on the "most downloaded" list. Oprah is keeping up on the same subject forward from here. Check the Wide Awake Living blog or her website to learn about who she is having on next. All I know now is that the first Monday after Eckhart ends (May 19th) she will have Jill Bolte Taylor on there--the woman who made that amazing video about her stroke which I gave you a link to a couple months ago. Should be fascinating! She has written a book too I heard, called "Stroke of Insight"

I would also like to recommend some beautiful spiritual music for you this month. The artist is Maniko. Her best album is "House of the Beloved". It is on itunes, but she also has a website at www.templeofsong.com. The album has some tones of ecstatic dance beats, mixed with uplifting lyrics and a crystal clear voice.

Have a great Pangea Day and a beautiful May,
With Love from Alice

Distinguishing

Between

Pain and Suffering

In order to be able to talk about the value of pain and suffering there is an important distinction to make between the two. The way that this distinction is made is based on my own personal experience of looking inside myself, and making some assumptions about the universality of what I see. These are not necessarily valid for each and every reader. Please use your own experience of yourself to temper my words in any way that is helpful to you in understanding your own experience.

The important distinction to make, as I see it, is that pain is something that comes to us from outside the mind. It is felt directly rather than being generated by our thinking. So when we stub our toe the sharp immediate pang of that, along with perhaps the prevailing ache afterwards is the pain. Suffering is the feeling that we generate with our thinking about something. Perhaps everyone has already noticed that there is a certain level of emotion that is caused by thought. If we think a lot about how a person has wronged us, pretty soon we conjure up a great deal of anger towards that person. We often mix this together with the actual pain of events. In relation to the stubbed toe, along with the sharp actual pain in the foot, we might then also begin to think thoughts about what a clumsy oaf we are, and interpret the looks on the faces of people nearby to verify that others think so too, and generate a very negative feeling about ourselves in the process. That would be suffering. That is what, at some point, is no longer necessary. For many of us, the mind-generated suffering in life is far greater than the actual pain that we experience.

Physical pain has a usefulness in that it jars us out of our hypnosis by coming from outside the mind, gets our attention and reminds us about our mortality. All of our physical bodies meet the same end, and feeling the truth of this can bring us into the present like nothing else. Suffering is useful too however, for however long it goes on. It points us to precise areas where we are not yet awake, assisting us to see how it is that we resist life where we could do otherwise. It motivates us to look deeply into what is going on with life, how we are living our lives, and what else is possible in a way that a pleasant easy life doesn’t do. I can see clearly in hindsight how the suffering that I experienced as a child and teenager was what put me on track to explore life deeply and try to see what was really going on. If I had been a happy young child, satisfied with the accomplishments available through school and friends, I probably would not have been interested in meditation and things like that as a teenager, but I was. I needed to know the deeper questions of life, because I wasn’t comfortable inside my own skin, because I was suffering.

Emotional pain and suffering can seem like a bit of a grey area when making this distinction. Say someone you love has died. Although there may be suffering caused by thinking about how you are going to miss them, there is also something more primal there also, is there not? The two get mixed together and it is not easy to pull them apart, but it is not necessary to do so. We can simply know that the two are mixed together and just be in the moment with that, letting go of the distinction in the living out of the experience. Distinguishing between the two in the midst of something like this is an unnecessary excursion into our thought processes at a time when our important task is to be fully with our feelings. Still we can look at the experience for its value as an example and see that there seems to be a first-response feeling that is not all that different from the physical pain of stubbing one’s toe—something that comes before we start thinking about it. Then there are the thoughts that stir other more complex emotions.

In our English language, we seem to be using the word emotion to talk about both of these things. It seems obvious to me at this point that not only these initial feelings when something happens, but also the initial feelings that we have when we are infants, before we develop our cognitive abilities are something quite different than what we generate with our thoughts about things. I wish that there was another word that we could use instead, but for lack of one I would like to use deep emotions and thought-based emotions. The deep emotions are the one’s that come first before thought. Obviously thought-based emotions are the ones that we cause as we think about things. The deep emotions are a lot like physical pain in that they come from outside of our mentally constructed world, and in some cases disrupt our mentally constructed world with their presence. They are like communications from the depths of who we are. This level of ourselves is what we experienced first, before we developed this mental overlay interpreting and categorizing everything. They give us a peek into a what lies behind the screen of thought. Included is what Jesus called the “peace that passeth understanding” or in other words a peace that we can’t even understand, a peace that is there standing completely outside of all of the reasons that we might have to be peaceful or not to be. It doesn’t have to do with what our circumstances are, what people are saying about us, what our children did or didn’t do—none of that. It just is what it is, unwavering.

Also included in this area I’m calling deep emotion would be many other “positive emotions” such as the bliss that many people talk about experiencing in the process of awakening. Also included are the feelings that we experienced when we were first born children when we didn’t yet have the capability to think about what was happening. This can often be some very difficult material to work with.

Whatever our feelings were at that stage, we had no ability to separate ourselves from them and say “I am this and I am having this feeling”. They were just there, and we had no ideas about them, and no separation from them, so we took them to be what we were. In my own case, this caused a great deal of trouble over the subsequent years. I had experienced a great deal of emotional pain as an infant (and no cause for it). Without any ability to separate myself from the feeling of that, I identified with it and then when my cognitive abilities developed I made the assumption that there was something quite defective about me. This idea was then built in as a foundation stone of the personality structure that grew as I matured, and it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how that would have caused both me and my loved ones a lot of difficulty all the way along. These kinds of deep emotions tend to be the very last things we ever want to be with, and we do all sorts of things to avoid them. At this point it feels like I kept all this kind of material locked in the proverbial cellar of my being, and wouldn’t let it out, no matter how much it wanted to come to the light.

Based on my own experience, it seems that all of this locked up material needs is for us to stop resisting it and pushing it away. It needs an opportunity to come to the light and be a part of the One Life also. To stop resisting it is to be willing to feel it when it arises. There is no need to go digging for it. Life circumstances will be orchestrated so that it will be triggered in right timing, and all that is needed is for us to be willing to feel it, welcome it, include and embrace it, and it is no longer feels like a boogeyman in the closet, or a troll in the cellar. It comes into harmony with life in a way, finds its peace.

© 2008 Alice Gardner

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